Dalí & the Impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Degas & more

The exhibition at The Dalí Museum explores Salvador Dalí’s profound engagement with the Impressionist movement, which played a pivotal role in his early artistic journey.

In the first decades of the 20th century, before his involvement with Surrealism, Dalí closely engaged the major achievements of the 19th-century French Impressionist movement. In a range of luminescent landscape paintings, he represented the geography most personal to his life in Catalonia, Spain. As Dalí became Dalí, Impressionism stayed with him, both its core principle of rebellion and the importance it placed on the artist’s keen observations of place.

Organized in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, one of the foremost collections of French Impressionism in the United States, this exhibition presents a selection of 22 paintings from their collection by 18 artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne. Situating these works alongside 18 of Dalí’s earliest paintings, this exhibition illuminates their impact on the artist and offers a rare opportunity to view Impressionist masterpieces, many showcased for the first time in Florida.

In his early years, Dalí was highly aware of the work of the Impressionists. Born in 1904, he embraced aspects of the movement’s technique beginning in 1918, and Impressionism came to indelibly mark his evolving style. By probing the formative role of his engagement with this tradition, this exhibition reveals surprising continuities between Impressionist and Surrealist approaches to the representation of lived experience, across the 19th and 20th centuries.

Dalí’s affinity for Impressionism persisted long after he came into his own as an artist in his preoccupation with the geography of his youth, the Mediterranean coast of Catalonia, Spain. Dalí’s explorations of his homeland, its distant mountains and dizzying views, became synonymous with the landscape of the surreal.

Visitors may also become part of the artistic process and learn more about Impressionist techniques by participating in the interactive experience, Your Portrait. Harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence, this innovative application captures the distinctive features of the 19th century movement, transforming a selfie into a unique Impressionist work of art.